Gattaca - Hollywood Gets It Exactly Right
video.nytimes.com
video.nytimes.com
From multi-touch user interfaces to immense speedups in the analysis of genetic data and the social changes that would bring with it.
Plenty of people - smart ones at that - still disagree with that opinion though, I wonder why.
Even if the exact situation is hard to predict these things are for me undeniably part of our future:
- genetic screening for employees
It's simple, there may be laws against it, there will be plenty of resistance, but in the end it will probably be allowed. Someone will use the 'think of the victims' argument. After a particularly bad 'employee going postal' episode and it will be argued that this could have been prevented with proper screening. Or it may start with certain high profile jobs only, and then slowly become acceptable practice elsewhere.
- genetic screening of children
Genomic optimization, or whatever you want to call it will be driven by alignment of two desires, first the desire or parents to have a 'perfect' child, second by society as a whole to improve life-span and to decrease the cost of medical care.
- ever more reliance on genetics in forensics
There is already quite a trend under way here, every year many more people are convicted because of genetic evidence, just like with fingerprints originally genetic evidence is by some considered to be infallible, but it has already been proven that that is not the case:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/pos...
As for the tech in the movie it is almost but not quite here. There is a company in Switzerland that I had some brief contact with about a year ago that claims they can sequence a whole genome in under 10 days using a clever technique where they break up the DNA strings in much smaller segments than 'normal' (a few hundred basepairs, where 'normal' was more like 4000-10000 bp) and then analyze them in an on-chip laboratory.
The output of this process is an endless stream of jpegs of fluorescent segments that are then analyzed by a pipeline of clustered computers that piece together the original sequence by first pulling the short subsequences out of the jpegs, then matching up the overlaps.
Because of the shorter sequences the chemical step gets much shorter (< 1 hour) but the computational complexity of the problem gets much worse.
As computers get faster and are able to use ever shorter sequences without losing track of what goes where (the lower limit is somewhere around a few hundred base-pairs I believe) we'll probably see time on the order of a day within a decade.
The http://genomics.xprize.org/ bets that someone will be able to do 100 genomes in 10 days. The reason why that does not equate to a runtime of 1/10th of a day is because the process is heavily pipelined, so a lab throwing all its current resources at the problem for a single genome could already beat that number but that would not mean any significant improvement in technology.
To have a sustained output of one completed genome every 2.4 hours would be a pretty major breakthrough.
An all out effort would be limited by these steps that have to be run in sequence:
- the breaking up - amplification - photography - analysis - reassembly
Disclaimer: I'm not at all a professional in this field (though some days I wished I was!), just an interested lay person, chances are that some of the above is wrong or already outdated.
Out of curiousity, where are you? In most of Europe, eugenics is deeply taboo.
I know it is taboo, but ignoring the possibility that it will happen anyway also seems to be taboo. We're edging slowly in that direction.
The drive for this stuff to happen is there, maybe they'll do it illegally, rich people only, maybe it will be 'special cases only' at first but somehow I expect it to creep in under the radar.
Personally I think it is a bad development, I'm not sure if google books results work but here is one to a book called 'backdoor to eugenics':
http://books.google.com/books?id=48t9i33bMqMC&dq=backdoo...
And that's not even beginning to address the potential consequences of meddling with machinery that you do not fully understand.
If I may ask, why do you think so?
My family has a history of bad knees. Like, a third of my family over age 30 have had significant knee injuries. I had one at age 22.
My girlfriend's family has a slight history of heart troubles.
My family has no such heart problems. Her family has no such knee problems. If there was a way to ensure any children we had would take its general cardio systems from my bloodlines, and joints from her bloodlines - sign me up. I have better eyesight, whereas she has perfect skin. I have broad shoulders and a strong frame, whereas she has a cheetah's metabolism.
If I could ensure my children got the best traits of both of us, I'd do it happily and pay a lot for it. It seems like a fantastic thing to me, and the idea of it is pretty exciting. Thoughts on why it might lead to bad places?
I fail to see how you can only have the one without the other, you can just wait for 'designer eye colours' and other fashionable items such as the ultimate breast implant (simply encode for that perfect breast size) and so on...
I fully sympathize with those who would like to get rid of hereditary diseases, pretty much every family has their share of them, but you have to ask yourself if you think it is wise to second-guess evolution before having fully grokked the mechanisms and datastructures at work here.
As long as we refer to the majority of our DNA as 'junk' we have a long way to go in this respect.
You are exactly the person I had in mind when I wrote above that parents would like to have 'perfect' children.
Do you have any reason to believe we will be introducing more trouble down the line than if we'd continued procreating in the usual fashion? I don't see any actual argument. Genetic techniques can even be globally beneficial in the long run by counterbalancing the dysgenic effect of modern medicine that helps genetically disadvantaged people survive and procreate.
I'm afraid you've got me there, this is speculative in nature, only time will tell.
Let me try another angle then, to me evolution is not about individuals, individuals are merely the current vessels holding a single copy (with possibly some local variations if you want to be very precise) of the status quo in contemporary genetics as perceived by that individual.
Sexual reproduction is in the majority of the cases the way in which this genetic material gets mixed and slowly, over generations these changes + mutations introducing new variation have converged on the diversity that you can observe around you.
To find the 'keys to the kingdom', to get 'root' on this system is of course a very powerful tool, but if you don't know exactly how powerful a tool is or how it works you would be wise to meddle with it as little as possible until you do have that knowledge.
Keep in mind that we will be selecting for phenotype only, what's going on under the hood is a question that your great-great-grandchildren might be able to answer, and if our luck of the draw runs against us it is possible that we introduce some effect that will only become apparent to them, we'll be long dead by then.
Those effects could be worse than the things we are trying to cure today, and I'm merely cautioning to be careful about unintended side effects of over enthusiastic modifications to our 'imperfect' genome.
It has served us well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt until we have solid proof that we are not going to create a larger problem.
Ordinary natural selection, including human sexual selection, works this way too. I still fail to see why you worry.
Say a couple want children, but they want a red-haired girl, even though their genetic combinations make that an impossibility (just for the sake of an example I took something from the 'cosmetics' department, not from the disease department) you could conceivably splice in the genes to make that happen.
The problem here is that even though the resulting phenotype may be the desired one that there could be any number of interactions between the 'undesired' genes and the rest of the genome to keep the genome as a whole stable across generations.
It will take a long time before we will know if that's the case or not.
Why would you want that, if every generation has the option of designing their children anyway? And they can always revert to a backup genotype from 2000 if there's no other recourse.
That's true now, but these things can change very quickly. (For example, that taboo is relatively recent.)
But we are nowhere near determining someone's potential intelligence based on their DNA. I think most scientists believe that is impossible - DNA does not determine your intelligence with that much detail.
I do think that soon it will be cheap and easy to sequence your own genome. There is great hope for personalizing medicine, treatments tuned to you that are twice as effective. But genetic screening will not take on the role it does in Gattaca. A genetic screen will not give you better information than a 1-hour interview.
(I'm not a professional in this field but I did get a master's in computational biology, working on genome sequencing.)
Are we in danger of creating a society of a "genetic upper class"? Sure, as long as there are people willing to buy into the idea that genetics determines our future there will be people that want to exploit that for their own personal gain. But that is why it will continue to be our duty to defend the dignity of human beings and use science to improve the lot of all of us, not to exclude some in favor of others based on some pseudo-scientific eugenicist fantasy.
It's not as though our current status of 'defending' the rights of the people in tight spots on this planet gives us much hope that in the future we will suddenly become a completely different race in this respect. History is littered with the corpses of those who were taken advantage of, I fail to see how the future will somehow be magically different.
I would hope that there are a noble few that choose to stand up to such a development.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Oh, how we've forgotten where we have come from.
That said, Gattaca is unpractical for two very practical reasons:
First, environment matters at least as much as genetics.
Second, the Heisenberg Principle: knowing about a genetic predisposition will change it. Who do you think has a bigger chance of having diabetes: somebody who was tested at birth to have a 35% chance, or somebody with 10%? In the real world and with reasonably cheap medicine it's the second. With a 1/3 chance, not only will you have regular checkups, but you'll watch your diet and most likely take preventive medicine.
Actually I think this is a still virgin aria which may develop a lot with genetic testing: get early treatment so as _not_ to get a certain disease.